GigaWatt ICO Raises $15 Million to Let You Mine Bitcoin For $600 Through an Ethereum Token

One of the more interesting ICO currently in progress is GigaWatt, a Washington state-based mining facility that allows you to rent space for bitcoin or ethereum mining.

Founded by Dave Carlson, a software engineer that started a bitcoin mining company all the way back in 2012, they have developed proprietary Giga Pods which, according to the whitepaper prospectus:

“Takes advantage of the mining hardware’s extremely high power density, avoids active cooling consumption, and saves power for high-efficiency mining, thus minimizing costs in every aspect of mining operations.”

You can just rent those facilities for your own mining hardware, if you have one. Otherwise, you can buy mining gear and send it there for hosting, with GigaWatt managing all the rest, including repairs, while charging you for the electricity use.

They are now, in effect, tokenizing that electricity by using an ethereum based token, WTT, that amounts to one watt.

You can pay them to host your miners with that token, or you can rent out WTT to someone else, with all of the facility renting to take place through the token once it fully launches.

That gives WTT an underlying utility, so it might retain a stable value, although how stable would depend on the supply and demand for digital currencies mining.

Currently, that demand might be considerable. It costs more than $2,000 for one bitcoin. To mine it through GigaWatt’s facilities costs less than $600 trustnodes is told.

GigaWatt’s mining farm

GigaWatt stated their figure of $600 “is calculated based on ongoing costs required to mine 1 BTC (electricity and maintenance) and the cost of buying mining equipment (price of one miner divided by the approximate number of BTC which it will mine during its lifecycle).

To calculate this price, we take into account the current equipment price, its hash rate, power efficiency, bitcoin mining difficulty, average monthly mining difficulty increase, electricity costs, and maintenance.”

Bitcoin’s price was less than $300 just last year, seeing a 10x increase since then, with ethereum gaining even more appreciation, so mining is likely to be very profitable at this stage, although any changes in difficulty may make a significant difference.

“Access to inexpensive energy makes the location particularly economical, especially compared to many East Coast cities where interest in digital currencies is rising rapidly,” GigaWatt said.

China, however, where most of the mining takes place, has even cheaper energy, with many of the miners there planning expansions as the hashrate (hardware) continues to relentlessly increase daily.

But if the figure of $600 is indeed correct, then it sounds like free money, which may mean further allocation of resources towards bitcoin and ethereum mining until an equilibrium is reached.